Not yet, but soon (3)

Of course, you really need to keep you population occupied at all times, because as soon as they start to seriously consider all that mumbo jumbo, they’ll not only realize that those ‘holy men’ are nothing but a bunch of manipulative liars and/or idiots, or at the very least misguided, but also that even if this ‘God’ person exists, he’s a tyrant to be overthrown, not a benevolent ruler to be worshipped. I am talking about monotheistic religions in this case, obviously, and the difference between those and the polytheistic religions is quite important, from a social planning perspective. You see, when only a single God exists, there exists but a single truth, a single way of life, a single sexual position. People will worship with fervor and zeal, but external contacts, or even the slightest internal social change, will light the torches, sharpen the pitchforks and erect the stakes. Polytheism is generally more relaxed, simply because anyone can pretty much invent any god they want and no one can disprove him or her, at the risk of disproving one’s own god. This rarely works on its own, however, because any young society needs more stringent rules than those a polytheistic religion can provide in itself. Once another system has provided a stable counterweight – a caste system, or a strong nationalistic feeling, or some such – the problem no longer becomes the religion, as that has become little more than pro forma packaging.
But all that doesn’t really matter. Order has always been humanity’s end goal, as far as we actually have an end goal. Yeah sure, you could talk through your neck or out of your ass about divine beings and chosen races and pots of gold at the end of a rainbow, and you’ll always find people stupid, naieve or desperate enough to listen, but that doesn’t mean there’s an ounce of truth in these doctrines. None at all! No, order has always been our end goal. Every society up until we first managed to escape our atmosphere has tried to achieve this by total control. Whether it is a dictatorship that uses whip and collar, or a republic that uses money and media, the underlying theory never changes: let the elite rule the country and make sure the general populace doesn’t stray beyond the rules of your society. Chaos is to be avoided at all costs, because it would simply destroy the elite’s power, which is not something that is to even be considered. And who can blame them? People have shown time and time again that they are in need of leadership, that even an oppressive regime is preferable to no regime at all. But humanity evolved – and this caused a double rift with the old regimes, because not only did humanity become held back by the old ways, those same old ways had trouble to even recognize that evolution existed, let alone that humanity had indeed evolved. It’s like the chicken and the egg: ten seconds of logical thought tells us that the egg had to be first, because otherwise we’d have an animal that resembled a chicken, but didn’t come out of an egg (and therefore can’t be a chicken). I mean, QED, but still we debated and discussed and paid academics to write articles on it. Similarly, it was clear that by the time nobody cared about Paris Hilton anymore (which was, in fact, long overdue and thus could actually be seen as a counter-argument), the old institutions could no longer rule by virtue of the people. More and more, repression was used against forms of non-violent dissent. Because while it were the institutions that had provided their populations with the means of fully transcending their baser instincts (I’m talking about greed, violence and stupidity; sex stopped being a problem by the time the pope declared that he always used Durex’ topsafe condoms when clubbing in Rome’s gay quarter. It was a great day for Christianity.) the institutions couldn’t cope with their ‘children’ growing up.